


If We're to Go on Living

by fivefootthree



Category: MacGyver (TV 2016)
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Inspired by Poetry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-28
Updated: 2018-09-28
Packaged: 2019-07-18 17:06:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,458
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16122980
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fivefootthree/pseuds/fivefootthree
Summary: Looking out over LA and waiting for the sunrise, Jack helps Mac deal with the fallout of leaving the Phoenix.





	If We're to Go on Living

**Author's Note:**

> Sliding this in before tonight's premiere! It's first in what I hope will be a series of cross-fandom fics inspired by poems I read. This one is based off Wislawa Szymborska's poem "Four in the Morning." See the end notes for the full text of the poem.

In the end, he calls Jack. Just like Jack knew he would, just like Jack had worked to convince Riley and Matty. Bozer had agreed with him from the first.

“Jack?”

It was late, nearing three in the morning the day after Mac resigned, when the jangle of Jack’s ring tone makes Jack spring awake, Riley and Bozer startling up next to him. He answers before the first ring is over.

“Mac?”

There’s a hitch in his boy’s breathing on the other side of the line.

“Yeah,” Mac says, his voice cracking. Jack could hear Mac force his breathing into something mechanical, something that would help him wrest his voice back under his control. _In. Out. In. Out._ Jack swallows, feeling a lump dangerously close to bursting rising up in his throat.

“Where are you, son?”

“I don’t—don’t really know,” he stutters. “Can you—Riley—”

“Yeah, yeah, of course. Just, hang on a sec—” Jack turns to Riley. “Can you track his phone, Riles?”

She nods, already pulling up her laptop.

“She’s on it, Mac.”

“Good.” His voice comes back quickly, almost before Jack had finished speaking. “Thanks, that’s, that’s good.”

A long pause again, Mac’s still mechanical breathing coming over the phone. Jack longed to have Mac in front of him, but something in him told him to be still, to wait.

“I got him,” Riley says a few minutes later, turning her screen around to show Mac’s location on a map, six miles away east towards the outskirts of LA.

“We got you, brother. We know where you are. How you wanna play this?”

“Could you—could you come get me? Please.” His voice cracks again.

Jack sags with relief. “You bet, Mac. I’m on my way. Stay with me on the line, ok?”

“Just—just you. Please. Tell Bozer and Riley I’m sorry.”

“Nothing to be sorry for, son. I’ll be there soon.”

They don’t talk while Jack drove over. Mac could hear the sounds of the road through the phone: the occasional passing car, a police siren, Jack muttering occasionally under his breath.

It was a very bedraggled Mac that Jack found sitting on the side of a deserted hill looking out over the city. Jack parked the car on the side of the road and got out of the car, detouring to the trunk to rifle through his go-bag for the spare jacket he kept there.

Mac’s eyes follow Jack as he walks up to him, then look away as Jack stops in front of him. “Thanks for coming,” he says.

Jack winced at the hoarse gravelly sound in Mac’s voice. “You been swallowing glass, brother? Hold on a sec.” He hands Mac the jacket and jogs back to the trunk for a water bottle. When he comes back, Mac is still holding the jacket, twisting it absently in his palms.

“That’s for you to put on, you know. It’s kinda cold out here, isn’t it?”

Mac looks up in confusion, registering the bottle held out to him.

“Here,” Jack says, crouching down on his heels and setting the water bottle and a snack bar on the ground next to Mac. He takes the jacket from Mac, unzips it, and tugs it around his shoulders. Without thinking about it, Mac’s hands snag the edges and tuck them in closer around himself before reaching for the opened bottle Jack hands to him.

A deep breath shudders out from him. “Thanks,” he says as Jack sits down next to him. He empties the bottle, panting a bit from the effort. Jack smiles at him, taking the opportunity to look Mac over. He catalogues the pale skin, the bruises under his eyes, the slow reactions. Exhaustion is written into every line of the boy’s face, and Jack’s heart twists for his vulnerable young partner, swathed in Jack’s too-big jacket and just looking terribly young.

“What’s going through that mind of yours, Angus?”

Mac’s bloodshot eyes flicker toward Jack’s gaze before skittering away again. “To be honest,” he says, slow like the words are being pulled out of a deep well, “I’m not sure.” The words seem to stick like glue in the hollow of Mac’s cheeks, and Jack feels a little ill. “I…put everything into this. Finding my dad. It was…nothing I’d anticipated.”

That was perhaps the largest part of the problem, Jack guesses. Mac plays out every scenario, sifting through them faster than anyone else could, in order to pick out the best possible outcome and make it happen. That’s his mode of operation. This all made Mac realize how open to attack he is.

Jack flounders for words. It was important to say the right thing here, so important. But, he just doesn’t know.

“Yeah,” he says finally. “Nothing in my playbook for this either.”

Mac huffs out something that might have been a laugh. “I can’t really believe I quit,” he confesses.

“You had good reason to do so,” Jack acknowledged, thinking of the long night they had spent talking about it.

“I don’t really—I can’t _compute_ it,” Mac says. “I can’t make sense of it, I can’t accept it.”

“What, exactly?” Jack feels the breeze shift, and realizes that the day is coming. He doesn’t feel ready.

“My _Dad_.” Mac’s voice cracks. “Everything is so… _sideways_.”

Jack feels utterly helpless, wanting to right things up for Mac and just not knowing how.

“Well,” he tries. “Name one thing that’s right side up. Start there. Start from what you know.”

Mac pauses. Jack can hear Mac’s breath shudder, and he is ready when Mac suddenly reaches out his hand to Jack. Jack takes it, clasps those clever fingers between his palms. Even through the small contact, Jack can feel Mac trembling. “You,” Mac says. “You don’t move.”

“Damn straight I don’t. I’m right where I’m meant to be. Who else?”

“Bozer.” Jack _feels_ the trembling ease as Mac remembers his best friend. “Riley.”

“Good, Mac. Yes. You know us. We’ve rooted ourselves with you; there ain’t no leaving you behind, ever.”

Mac is nodding, withdrawing his hand before Jack even finishes his sentence. “Jack, I know. It’s just—I feel—” He broke off in a shrug.

“Hollow?” Jack supplied.

Mac looked at him, startled. “Yeah.”

After a pause, Mac starts again. “I mean, I’m not sure what is left after this. What I ever really had to begin with.”

“You feel like the earth itself has betrayed you.”

Mac’s eyes darken. _Yeah_. Mac forgets, sometimes, that Jack understands.

“To be fair,” Jack continues after a few moments. “No one feels good at—” he checks his phone. “four o’clock in the morning.”

“Except ants, maybe,” Mac mutters absently, watching as an ant climbed over the valleys and peaks of his knuckles.

A smile flickers over Jack’s bemused face. “If ants feel good at four o’clock in the morning, well, three cheers for ants.”

Amusement softens Mac’s features for a moment, and Jack is struck by a familiar wave of fondness for the young man next to him. “Sorry,” he offers. “That was really random.”

Jack shrugs, waving it off. “If it puts a smile back on your face, I’m all for it.”

Mac smiles, a quick flash of a thing that’s gone before it really even happened, and looks down.

Jack looks at him, assessing. He moves to Mac’s right and sits next to him. “Sometimes, Mac,” he says, “All that’s left is just to hurt for a while before you pick up the pieces and make something new out of them.”

A slow exhale is Jack’s only response. Jack can feel the sadness bleeding off Mac as he lies back into the rise of the hill behind him.

“You already do that, Mac,” he says, following Mac down. “It’s just that this time it’s personal.”

“It’s intrusive,” Mac answers quietly. “I always thought that, um, my own mind is my own space. Nothing can happen there that I don’t want. But with this, I feel like my defenses have been blown wide open and everything’s just _stopped_.”

“Your mind is your own space, son,” Jack agrees. “Let the fires die down. In the morning you can start rebuilding.”

After a long silence, Mac nods beside him. Jack feels Mac shift next to him, and suddenly there’s a heavy head resting on his shoulder. Jack can smell Mac’s shampoo as he dips his own chin, resting it against Mac’s forehead.  


Once Mac is lax next to him, his breathing gone slow and regular, Jack relaxes too. The night is warm enough. He’d see out the sunrise, and then take Mac home to his boy’s own bed.

Moving carefully, he checks his phone. Just past five. They would keep on living.

**Author's Note:**

> Four in the Morning  
> Wislawa Szymborska, translated from the Polish by Magnus J. Krynski and Robert A. Maguire
> 
> The hour from night to day.  
> The hour from side to side.  
> The hour for those past thirty.
> 
> The hour swept clean to the crowing of cocks.  
> The hour when earth betrays us.  
> The hour when wind blows from extinguished stars.  
> The hour of and-what-if-nothing-remains-after-us.
> 
> The hollow hour.  
> Blank, empty.  
> The very pit of all other hours.
> 
> No one feels good at four in the morning.  
> If ants feel good at four in the morning  
> —three cheers for ants. And let five o’clock come  
> If we’re to go on living.


End file.
